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This chapter examines the role of vagrancy law in regulating the affective, sexual, reproductive, and domestic lives of the English poor. It traces vagrancy's appearance at the margins of both the novel and the marriage plot across a series of texts, including Jane Barker's Patchwork Screen for the Ladies (1723), Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall (1762), and, most centrally, Henry Fielding's The Female Husband (1746). Fielding, as novelist, magistrate, and major eighteenth-century theorist of police, is at the center of the chapter, which reads his figuration of vagrancy as a kind of sexuality that disrupts labor-discipline, marriage, and legitimate inheritance. At the same time, Fielding's text and the archival records of policing that surround it reveal how one might take vagrancy as a category of analysis for transgender history, since the construction of the sexed body as metonym for juridical identity developed through a nexus of policing, surveillance, and transatlantic print culture for which vagrancy was a foundational legal category. Finally, through readings of Scott's Millenium Hall and Mary Saxby's posthumously published Memoirs of a Female Vagrant (1806), the chapter shows that literary histories of sexuality look profoundly different if one centers the parish rather than the family as the field of analysis.

This essay analyzes the unique features of Estudios: Revista Ecléctica (Valencia, 1928-1937), a Spanish libertarian cultural magazine that had a significant international presence and strong link with the American continent. Estudios was particularly important because of its diffusion and prestige among the libertarian working class, and the freethinking milieu on both sides of the Atlantic. Through its coverage of a broad range of modern topics (birth control, eugenics, sexual reform, naturism, and so forth), Estudios was part of a transnational network that connected militants, writers, scientists, doctors, and anarchist propagandists, and those who held revolutionary and progressive sensibilities. It had a stable and solid readership in the United States, with regular points of sales and distribution, and connections with propagandists, centers, and publications close to its main topics of interest.

This chapter moves from sights of Paris as a revolutionary underground to sites of Paris in ruin, from unexpected forms of imperial adventure or subterranean possibility to uncanny forms of affective possession. While The American Scene has been the privileged site to examine Henry James’s fascination with—and affective responses to—lost landmarks and newly minted ruins, I excavate the sights of and detours around the post-Commune ruins of Paris in his writings and contemporary periodical culture. Situating James’s attention to charred landscape and vanished tourist sights alongside their ongoing returns in U.S. print and visual culture, I suggest, crucially reconfigures James’s transformative and uncannily embodied “historic sense” even as it recovers the post-Commune ruinscape that came to function as an unexpectedly charged site of transnational memory in U.S. literary, visual and performance culture.